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Coherence (New Literary History, vol. 35, no. 2, Spring 2004)

Coherence (New Literary History, vol. 35, no. 2, Spring 2004)

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

New Literary History focuses on theory and interpretation-the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres. Throughout its history, NLH has always resisted short-lived trends and subsuming ideologies. By delving into the theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexamines the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs. 

Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2004: Coherence

Introduction (Tucker, Herbert F.)

Haack, Susan.

  • Coherence, Consistency, Cogency, Congruity, Cohesiveness, &c.: Remain Calm! Don't Go Overboard!

Abstract:"Coherent," "consistent," "cogent," etc., have multiple meanings and multiple objects: what a logician means by speaking of the consistency of an axiomatic system, for example, is not what a literary critic means by speaking of the consistency of a fictional character or the congruity of this sub-plot with the overall theme of a novel; what an epistemologist means by speaking of the coherence of a set of beliefs is not what a sociologist or political theorist means by speaking of the cohesiveness of a society or church or trade union. The paper first disentangles some of these many meanings; then presents an assessment of coherentism in epistemology; and finally tackles some of the questions posed by the editor about the "value-ladenness" of the concept of coherence, its connections with communitarian ethics or perhaps with totalitarian politics, its place in literary and in academic writing, and its relevance to composition teaching

Herbert, Christopher, 1941-

  • The Conundrum of Coherence

Abstract: The doctrine of coherence, of the radical interconnectedness of (all) things, was widely proclaimed in the nineteenth century as the cardinal principle of specifically modern, avant-garde and relativistic, intellectual enterprise, particularly in various areas of the natural and social sciences. Not merely a protocol of scientific rationality, the rule of coherence was also idealized as a principle of value. At the same time, a growing number of nineteenth-century thinkers became ever more acutely aware that the doctrine of coherence entailed potentially severe epistemological dilemmas. If all things are exhaustively interconnected and if, therefore, relations and not intrinsic properties of things form the sole objects of scientific inquiry, then all analysis, particularly analysis of causes and effects, is fated to expand uncontrollably and never to be able to attain even provisional conclusions. Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938) bases its revolutionary approach to literary analysis on the same formulations of the coherence doctrine that were already commonplaces across a broad spectrum of fields in late-Victorian times, prompting questions as to how literary study was able for so many decades to remain impervious to the progressive intellectual trends that had long since transformed nearly every other area of research. The incurable self-contradictions of the coherence doctrine are mystified in Understanding Poetry, but they signal themselves in the assertion of an ethic of critical authoritarianism and in the promotion of a dubious creed of "total interpretation." In postmodern literary studies, one encounters both a strong reaction against the doctrine of coherence and, notably in work inspired by Michel Foucault, a resurgence of it. An instance of the latter is found in D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988), in which the idea of coherence is given totalizing form in the invocation of the fantastic apparition called "Discipline." As a corrective to such an argument, coherence needs to be recognized not as a given or as a fact of nature but as an existential and performative category-and even, as James Frazer laments in a preface to The Golden Bough, a potentially tragic one.

Megill, Allan.

  • Coherence and Incoherence in Historical Studies: From the Annales School to the New Cultural History

Abstract: In the mid-twentieth century the prominent Annales school historians Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel advocated a unified, "total" history. Their efforts in this direction did not meet with success, and have been superseded by the efforts of some practitioners of "social" and "new cultural" history to impose one or another "paradigm" on historical research and writing. Such efforts are misguided. Typically, if they are not simply cynical grabs for academic power, they arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of what historical research ought to offernot blithe certainty, but an understanding of complexity and contingency in human life.

Ruthrof, Horst.

  • The Fourth Critique

Abstract: The paper asks whether interpretive practice today could be said to rival the revolutionary moment of Kant's Critique of Judgment, at the centre of which stands the functional relation between of the heuristic stipulation of a shifting frame and its hermeneutically dependent detail. After all, the paper argues, the evolution of interpretation from Kant to postmodern writings has endowed us with a rich repertoire of tools to bring to the task of reading. However, the paper insists, there are two conditions which, if violated, result in the abandonment of interpretation: (1) contrary to talk of 'empty' or 'mere' signifiers, we cannot let go of the signified and (2) contrary to claims to radical interpretive freedom we cannot abandon heuristic coherence. Coherence phobia and the dream of a signifier without conceptuality are discussed against the background of notions of indeterminacy and infinite regress. The paper concludes that neither of the two constraints, insistence on the signified and heuristic coherence, should be regarded as metaphysically nostalgic but rather as grounded in the 'material' conditions of the autopoietic facts of human-scale perception and hence our organic bodies.

Allen, Barry, 1957-

  • The Ubiquitous Artifact: On Coherence

Abstract: Most of the terms that might seem to be necessary or sufficient conditions on coherence turn out to be no more than styles or modes of coherence, never the thing itself. This is true even of logical consistency. We can no more capture the possibilities of coherence in a timeless definition than we can capture the possibilities of games or works of art. Coherence is made and not found, invented and not discovered, and an artifact of embodied, historically contingent understanding, not the noetic mimesis of an intrinsic nature. It never comes naturally, innocently, or without art. In Kant's language, coherence is an Idea, an ideal that moves us. Remove our yearning for it and there is no residual coherence of things in themselves. Yet the origin of coherence is not in ideas or subjectivity but in artifacts, which are the very model of coherence, things that make sense because of how they are put together. The original objective synthesis occurs not in the immaterial solitude of transcendental consciousness but right out there before us in an artifact, always material in the first instance.

Colomb, Gregory G.
Griffin, June Anne
.

  • Coherence On and Off the Page: What Writers Can Know about Writing Coherently

Abstract: This essay explores two related issues in the coherence of written texts: one concerning the nature of coherence and one concerning how writers are able to think about it. Most current accounts treat coherence as a feature of the design of texts, chiefly of large-scale matters of "organization" that readers then register (or not). We argue that coherence is more properly thought of not as a feature of texts but as a quality of certain reading experiences, supporting that case with a variety of evidence drawn from research into both reading and writing. We also show, however, why writers have little use for a definition of coherence that refers primarily to qualitative, ad hoc features of particular reading experiences rather than to fixed elements of a text's design. So what writers need is an understanding of coherence that avoids the false security of traditional accountsÑorganize your ideas and readers will see their coherenceÑbut that allows them to focus on the texts they are producing. For them, the coherence of a text is best thought of as a measure of the number of ways in which a text supports readers in generating a coherent understanding of it. In closing, we point to a few of the ways in which writers support a reader's achievement of coherence.

Ferguson, Frances, 1947-

  • Coherence and Changes in the Unknown World

Abstract: This essay undertakes to understand Foucault's interest in classification in The Order of Things as a contribution to debates about the availability of beliefs. If a standard defense of the possibility of religious belief involves claiming that religious belief does not need justification, it seems to make religious belief (and all sorts of beliefs about things that are not part of the world of experience) look as though it is a mere product of the wills of individuals. Foucault's analysis of historical shifts in the conceptual operations performed by classifications does not suggest, as some commentators have thought, that there is no distinction between facts and fictions. Instead, his view implies that the modern era recruited concepts for the world of experience, so that individual examples and the concepts that identified them in terms of their types were related more actively to one another than to unseen causes beyond the world of experience. Bentham's discussion of religion in The Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind of 1822 serves to indicate exactly how far the modern understanding of individuals in relation to groups or types in the social and experiential world came to compete with the possibility of belief in an unseen deity as a cause of the world of our experience. In Bentham's account, belief in a deity who dispenses posthumous rewards and punishments is not a mere supplement to human law with its present structure of rewards and punishments. Instead, Bentham argues that religion is in direct competition with secular law and its evaluations of human actions, that religion does not give meaning to life but rather deprives human action of significance.

Stafford, Barbara Maria, 1941-

  • Leveling the New Old Transcendence: Cognitive Coherence in the Era of Beyondness

Abstract: The underlying claim of this essay is that contemporary technonoetic culture--from artificial intelligence systems, to genetics, to nanotechnology--is rooted in the binary hyper-logic of transcendence. This principle of impossible-to-resolve oppositions was introduced in its extreme form in late neoplatonism and powerfully re-articulated for the moderns by the romantics. Despite claims that we exist in a multiverse of multiple realities, a rhetoric of beyondness continues to undermine any notion of bringing coherence to physical and mental worlds. But recent developments in cognitive science and neurobiology allow us to consider how knowledge might be extended and distributed into cross-linking patterns. Uncannily resembling the convergences of times and spaces in a single individual stimulated by viewing a Cornell box or the intersective universes of the cabinet of wonders, phenomenologically-inflected consciousness studies offer a coalescing alternative to the vertical impulse of vanishing perspectives.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly.

  • Stalking A New World Order

Abstract: The chapter reviews some of the conceptions of order as applied to the social sciences, stressing the notion of complex order which includes a dialectic tension between differentiation and integration. The claim made is that despite cultural and temporal differences, complex order is a goal that is endorsed by human communities everywhere. In a period of often catastrophic globalization, it is argued that the elements of a new world order must be discovered and implemented, or else the tensions inherent in the increasing inequality of access to resources might lead to even more violent conflicts than hitherto experienced on the planet.